Let me share my thoughts on the scrapper as well, but let me preface it by saying that I didn’t have as much time as I would have liked this weekend, so I might have missed some things. I do however believe that I have a fair feel of the elite specialization.
Hammer: I feel that the auto attack change is either a bit to slow or the might on it is too short to be truly useful outside of continuous auto attacking, which is a somewhat poor option considering kits and the engineer’s other tricks. At least with juggernaut you can simply quickly switch in and out of flamethrower to do whatever while maintaining decent stack size passively. I mirror the concerns voiced in previous post about the rest of the skills, especially the bugginess of skill 3 (and it being outrun with simple swiftness) and the way skill 4 functions. Finally I felt that the cooldowns across the board were a bit too high for the hammer to be truly enjoyable.
Function Gyro: It feels nearly non-existent as a specialization mechanic, at least in pve (I was only able to use it twice in total). From what I’ve read in this thread, it didn’t see much more utility in other game modes either. I felt like playing a regular engineer who happened to use a hammer. Considering how much the elite mechanics of other professions change the flavor of said profession I’d really like to see it reworked. My suggestion would be to have it out all the time and have it stick to the scrapper. It could pulse out swiftness in a small area around it (regular, small pulses; enough to just give perma-swiftness; it’s not like that isn’t easily achieved through other means anyways) and perhaps attack a single enemy every x seconds while it’s around the scrapper. The revive/stomp mechanic could be changed to actually having the gyro fly out and thus denying the scrapper the regular benefits it gives. Instead of lives, which can be easily cleaved down, it could be given a break bar when it’s ‘out’ instead and have the gyro automatically return to the scrapper after a stun phase when the bar is broken. All together these proposed changes (denying passive functionality, travel time to and from a target and the potential of a stun phase) should allow the cooldown to be reduced or even dropped entirely. Also the gyro needs extensive rework as for now the mine is more reliable with nearly identical function and an added boonstrip.
Gyros: I like the toolbelt skills these gyros bring, the instant activation, and, if they’d work as intended, they’d bring a nice variety of utility. The last point, however is the problem. The combination of too little hp, a hard capped maximum active time, and a cooldown that was way too long, resulted in them barely having any up-time in battle, making me change them out to other skills rather quickly. And that’s ignoring AI problems as well as them simply not being able to keep up with the scrapper. I feel the CD have to be dropped down to a maximum of their ‘fuel’ time for starters. A finisher on manually destroying them would also be much appreciated. Allowing the turret traits to be applied to the gyros as well would probably make them much more attractive as well. For me personally it would be likely be enough, together with the dropped CD, to not much mind them having both hp and ‘fuel’.
As to the traits, most of them feel alright. That said stabilization core is too situational to be of any real use in combat, super speed being non-stackable hurts shocking speed, and impact savant should also affect other forms of CC or at least daze for being the third minor of the elite specialization.
Finally, I’d like to put forward the idea of introducing a trait that makes the bolts of whirl finishers targetable. This would increase the functionality of both hammer skill 2 and the whirl gyro.